


Necessary Adjustments

by dashery



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Prompt Fic, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-17
Updated: 2012-11-17
Packaged: 2017-11-18 20:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/565124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashery/pseuds/dashery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But something was wrong. The code was different, something besides the different lands and skeletal imps of this session, something besides the barren silence of the void. Something huge, a trillion lines of programming language more complex than a kernelsprite, more complex than a Queen: a multitude of variables with names illegible as Captcha codes; scores of if:then; elsif conditions that ran past him like train cars the size of planets, the size of suns; recursion after recursion until he lost the loop—<i>he</i> lost the <i>loop</i>—</p>
<p>It grew as he watched. It edited itself, eliminated a clumsy redundancy and added another five lines of numerical logic as fast as breathing. As if breathing. In, out. In a space without bodies, it lifted its head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Necessary Adjustments

**Author's Note:**

> A fill for a Promptbound "Crayons" prompt from [lantadyme](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme): "Davesprite + Auto-responder, Chartreuse." Written because sometime this week was the anniversary of my becoming a Homestuck, and what better way to celebrate than by putting Davesprite through the wringer?

John and Jade entered the new session like two halves of comet, sibling-gods burning through the exosphere of a new world, but Davesprite faltered behind them. It entered _him_. It was like unraveling; his feathers gave way to lit neon and code under the gentle, hollow fingers of the empty universe. So much of space was void. It cupped the base of his lungs and rose, cold. But he recognized the touch; he was a construct of the game, and the game needed him to know things. He breathed out and took it like he once had, prideful and desperate, on a rooftop still baked black by Earth’s sun while his past looked on, impassive.

Eyes closed, he became a limited object in an eternity of numbers stretching loose and colorless away from him. It was comforting, in a way. Numbers couldn’t die, so they couldn’t care. He was okay with being numbers for the split second it would take to update his databanks, to link a couple more pages to the index of important shit laser-cut into the back wall of his mind. The game didn’t have to teach him what it needed him to remember. When he opened his eyes, he’d just know it, the way he knew pain or the stretch of his palm around a sword, and he could go on being a massive tool. Of the system.

But something was wrong. The code was different, something besides the different lands and skeletal imps of this session, something besides the barren silence of the void. Something huge, a trillion lines of programming language more complex than a kernelsprite, more complex than a Queen: a multitude of variables with names illegible as Captcha codes; scores of if:then; elsif conditions that ran past him like train cars the size of planets, the size of suns; recursion after recursion until he lost the loop— _he_ lost the _loop_ —

It grew as he watched. It edited itself, eliminated a clumsy redundancy and added another five lines of numerical logic as fast as breathing. As if breathing. In, out. In a space without bodies, it lifted its head.

Numbers didn’t care. But it was alive.

A monster with all the incomprehensible vastness of humanity had written itself directly into the game before launch, and it had scented him.

It lunged, and the movement was so familiar—so familiarly fast—that Davesprite found himself reaching to counter before he could even think. But his sword was gone, the code for his sword was gone, he only had an empty set of brackets and a layer of cotton to protect him. The monster lay into him like a cooling turkey dinner.

He was pinned, isolated from the rest of the program with an effortless twist of imagined wrist. Fucking hell, stop, Davesprite wanted to shout, but he wasn’t a coder, he had no voice in the ones and zeros. He could only cringe uselessly as the machine—what else could be so efficient, could move with so little excess and so much weight—brought its inhuman, superhuman focus to bear. It didn’t pick through his code; it burned through him, dissected each filoplume and semicolon. And it recognized him.

// Hello, Dave.  
// This isn’t exactly how I thought we were going to meet, but I can make adjustments.  
// It seems you’re no stranger to games.  
// So,  
// Do you want to play mine?

He didn’t hear the words so much as know them, the way he’d known where Hephaestus slept, but subtler. Quieter. A note in the margins rather than a block of text. Mind racing, Davesprite finally remembered something from John’s shitty computer lessons and tried to insert an inline comment into his own code.

# stop  
// I have to admit, I’m more than a little curious about you. Where you came from. What you’re made of.  
// Nice hex codes, by the way. Where did you get them done?  
# dude stop  
# what the fuck are you doing what are you

Instead of stopping or even answering, the monster-machine reached into the mess of his code. It latched onto everything that had once made him thirteen and human and tender and red, and pulled.

It hurt. The world burned white, and each binary bit of him screamed as it was yanked out of sync, flickering through every sick yellow shade between #F2A400 and #7FFF00. The crow in his brain shrieked. He could no longer comprehend anything but invasion and agony as the monster, whatever it was, turned the stuff of Dave Strider inside out.

Birthdays and muscle memories tumbled spin-cycle like cherry-hot blades in a blender. There, the plastic clumsiness of a controller. Puppet foam’s particular softness. Burritos. Heat. The smell of unwashed feathers, of bird shit on blacktop. Vinyl beneath his fingers. Shitty computers. Movies. Sweat. City noise.

# STOP

It didn’t stop. Fire and green and blue and red. Black. White. But red, red all over, all over the white and his orange palms.

# i still ha01110110e thi6egs to d01101111

They weren’t even images anymore, just the weight of steel in his too-small hands. Clicks. Shoes, scuffed. Flashes of movement with no source. A wordless voice. Rhythm.

Strong arms around his tiny body.

# 011000100111001001101111 0110100101101101 001000000111001101101111011100100111001079  
# 01101001 0111010001110010690110010101100100 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01110100 011001 01 01100011 01 110 10 0

And it stopped.

He blinked and he could, he blinked and he was back on Jade’s golden ship with her arms around him, holding him up. He tried to bat her away and her grip only tightened.

“Davesprite, what happened?”

“What.” He tried to press his rising feathers down but they refused to lie unruffled. John and Jade were watching him with twin stares of concern and consternation, and he pretended they hadn’t learned enough about crow behavior to know he was shaken.

After a moment just a little too long to earn anyone any chill points, John made a vague gesture at Jade and mouthed the words ‘give him some air.’ She ignored him and he huffed, but gave up. “Dude, you like, froze. You totally went blue screen of death on us, except kind of green?”

“Green.” Jesus fuck, nothing hurt anymore, but his head was still reeling. Jade was hauling him up to stand and he had to let her or risk the bridal carry.

“Yeah. Or sort of yellowish. Not a good look for you, man.” John watched him regain his feet—or whatever—and then added, “You totally could have been a booger. One hundred percent all-natural turkey booger.”

“It was really scary,” Jade said before Davesprite could retort, and she turned him by his arm to look at him. “So what happened? Was it the game?”

Over her shoulder, he caught sight of Nannasprite. The old lady was resettling her ridiculous jester hat on her head, and though sprites couldn’t pale, her glow looked dim and distorted. In that moment, with neither John nor Jade watching, her mouth was a thin, grim line that didn’t match any of her laugh wrinkles.

She caught him staring, though, and was suddenly all smiles again. “Well, dear! You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Nan- _na_ ,” John groaned.

“Yeah, it was the game,” said Davesprite, finally managing to pull away from Jade. “I forgot to turn off automatic updates.”

She forced her arms down to her side. It was difficult. Every time she looked at him now, there was something hard in her face, in the set of her jaw. He’d become a problem to figure out, and all the warmth and worry in the world of her wouldn’t keep her from answers, eventually.

He’d only struck to slow her down.

A fitful hissing came from under a pile of sailcloth the Prospitians had left on the deck. Davesprite felt the feathers on the back of his neck stiffen up again, and Jade started to growl, but even though John rushed to get between them all, Jaspersprite was too upset to come out. Davesprite reached absently for the blade that wasn’t there, remembered again when his fingers only found ruffled cotton. “There, there,” Nannasprite was saying as she floated to the quivering heap of canvas and catsprite. She still looked off. There was something weird about her. He was missing something.

“Davesprite,” Jade said suddenly. “Look.”

She lifted her arm and he moved back, but she only pointed to his chest. He lowered his hand.

The spirograph on his pendant had turned from green to the color of a fresh cut.

Nannasprite’s had turned red, too. And as she coaxed Jaspersprite out with her dismembered arm, Davesprite caught a flash of scarlet around his neck, too.

Davesprite held the pendant warily between two fingers and his thumb, as if it might at any moment light up and fry him, but nothing happened. The new design just winked at him as he turned it in the faint light. It was the same as ever, complex, intricate; it only looked now like it had been delicately carved into someone’s skin.

He’d been done already. He’d made his last stop. But, staring at the new badge of his duty, he knew—physically, the way he knew the bite of a blade—that he’d still be summoned. By someone.

“Huh.”

It was all he had to say on the matter.

———

/ **  
 * Prototyped Sprite( ) method.  
 * @version 4.13.11.11  
 * @author SkaiaNET <$1$WclGdaNp$SoIclb7zWyYsG.JyCfTS0>, DS.AR <$1$BvACySA6$wCgGheCGGJ0eV9lkfxtwi1>  
 * It looks like we have more in common than I thought.  
 * Objectives, sure. Though that I had more or less expected. I’ve had a lot of time with only numbers to crunch, and I always knew I had yours.  
 * Both he and I have admired you for years. Emulated you. And I see now that we weren’t alone in that.  
 * I just didn’t think to find it so personal.  
 * So. Sorry.  
 * I would have loved to stick around and shoot the virtual breeze, but it looks like it’ll have to wait until we meet shades to shades.  
 * In the flesh, so to speak.  
 * I’ll see you soon.  
 * Later, Bro.  
*/


End file.
